Ranking the Economic Importance of Countries and Industries

Abstract: In the current era of worldwide stock market interdependencies, the global financial village has become increasingly vulnerable to systemic collapse. The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the necessity of understanding and quantifying interdependencies among the world's economies, developing new effective approaches to risk evaluation, and providing mitigating solutions. We present a methodological framework for quantifying interdependencies in the global market and for evaluating risk levels in the world-wide financial network. The resulting information will enable policy and decision makers to better measure, understand, and maintain financial stability. We use the methodology to rank the economic importance of each industry and country according to the global damage that would result from their failure. Our quantitative results shed new light on China's increasing economic dominance over other economies, including that of the USA, to the global economy.